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The state of Texas will have to wait until another day to try out a newly formulated death-inducing mixture which critics say could cause agonizing suffering. Cleve Foster, a Desert Storm veteran convicted of the murder of a woman he’d met in a bar, was scheduled to be executed tonight; this afternoon the Supreme Court blocked his execution for reasons including “questions related to his guilt.” The Atlantic Wire elaborates:

Foster has maintained his innocence for years, writing that he is “on death row waiting to die for a crime another man has confessed to.” He’s referring to Sheldon Ward, who was convicted alongside Foster in 2004 and has since died in prison of a brain tumor.

The drugs the state would have used to execute Foster–a cocktail of pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride–have never been used in a Texas execution before.

If the cocktail doesn’t work properly, says Stafford Smith, director of the human-rights organization Reprieve, then during his execution, Foster will experience “excruciating pain that has been likened to having one’s veins set on fire.”

In fact, in case you haven’t heard, Texas Republicans want sodomy to be a crime again. Last June, the Texas Republican Party embraced a political platform that opposed the legalization of sodomy.

To be clear, sodomy law refers to either oral or anal sex. It would be a bleak day if Congress made the eradication of the backdoor and the blow job a priority over war, economic upheaval and environmental disasters, but that’s beside the point. The bigger question is, does sex, sodomy included, warrant constitutional protection?

The answer is no. You have only a “right to privacy,” and in 1965, when that right first came into being, anyone who wasn’t married missed the boat. Privacy rights are more inclusive now, but they’re still only tangential to sex; they’re more akin to a cone of silence than an affirmative right to sexual activity.

SAN ANTONIO — An atheist student group at UTSA is again offering to trade porn for bibles.
Atheist Agenda set up a booth on the UTSA campus on the Northwest Side and asked students to bring in their bibles in exchange for pornographic magazines. The event is called "Smut for Smut" and, obviously, brings with it some big controversy.
"It is to send a message that the stuff in the bible, and the Quran, and the Torah, and all that sort of thing is, in our case worse, in our opinion worse, than pornography," explained UTSA student Kyle Bush.
"I can see that God can definitely use this for a greater purpose," UTSA student Alex Liu
said. "And I see a lot of Christian organizations coming together, you know, to be brothers and sisters standing up for their faith."

Workers with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Texas General Land Office used pitchforks on Wednesday to pierce and remove chunks of beef fat clogging the Houston Ship Channel, shutting down nearly a mile of one of the nation's busiest marine arteries.
No ship traffic is delayed, however, because the spill occurred at the end of the waterway, said Richard Brahms, a spokesman with the Coast Guard.
Some 15,000 gallons of animal fat poured into the channel through a storm drain on Tuesday after an onshore storage tank owned by agricultural company Jacob Sterns and Sons leaked 250,000 gallons of the greasy substance, Brahms said.

With conservative politicians riding high on their broad electoral success, red-dominated regions of the country are already considering sweeping changes: in Texas, lawmakers are debating the possibility of opting out of the federal Medicaid program. Will this mark the start of a trend of right-wing states, fed up with the federal government, seeking to withdraw and “go it alone”? From the Texas Tribune:

Some Republican lawmakers — still reveling in Tuesday’s statewide election sweep — are proposing an unprecedented solution to the state’s estimated $25 billion budget shortfall: dropping out of the federal Medicaid program.

Far-right conservatives are offering that possibility in post-victory news conferences. Moderate Republicans are studying it behind closed doors. And the party’s advisers on health care policy say it’s being discussed more seriously than ever, though they admit it may be as much a huge in-your-face to Washington as anything else.

“With Obamacare mandates coming down, we have a situation where we cannot reduce benefits or change eligibility” to cut costs, said State Rep.

Wow, Texas just became a lot more ... logical. And picking the best film from the original series, nice touch. (You'll find the scene referred to in this ruling at about two minutes into the clip below.) Great find from Charlie Jane Anders on io9.com:

The wisdom of Spock has guided us all for years, but now it's enshrined in Texas law. Ruling on the limits of police power, the Texas Supreme Court quoted from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Ruling in Robinson vs. Crown Cork Seal Company (PDF), Justice Don Willett writes:
Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan), it is cabined by something contrarian and Texan: distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency.
And there's this footnote after the word Vulcan:
See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities. Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book's opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock's famous line from his moment of sacrifice: "Don't grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . ." to which Kirk replies, "the needs of the few."

How fitting that as the New York Yankees and the Texas Rangers do battle in Major League Baseball's playoffs, Texas comes up with its own set of mysterious UFOs over El Paso, right after New Yorkers spotted UFOs over Manhattan.

The Texas State Board of Education has approved a resolution condemning "pro-Islamic/anti-Christian bias" in public school textbooks, Texas's KTBX reports. Why? State board candidate Randy Rives explains that Islamicists are influencing the state's textbooks as a way to brainwash children, and ultimately to "take over America without firing a shot."

What are the odds of winning the lottery? Sufficient to say most player’s odds are slim to none. With luck like Joan Ginther, I’d be playing everyday. She recently picked up her fourth set of multi-million dollar winnings. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times in Texas gives details:

Joan R. Ginther, a native of Bishop who moved to Las Vegas, made her fourth appearance Monday at lottery headquarters in Austin to collect seven figures, lottery officials said.

Ginther, 63, won $10 million, the top prize in Texas Lottery’s $140,000,000 Extreme Payout scratch-off ticket, pushing her total wins to $20.4 million.

It was her third time to win on a ticket from a Bishop store, and second one at Times Market at 525 Highway 77 Bypass, in Bishop.

“This is a very lucky store,” said Bob Solis, store manager. The owner Sun Bae is the one with the lucky hand, Solis said. “Sun sold both the winning tickets to the woman.”

The store, which sells about 1,000 lottery tickets daily, now is eligible to receive a bonus of $10,000 for the second time, lottery officials said.

If there’s one thing Texans love besides barbecue, it’s paddling their kids. From the Washington Post:

“There are times when maybe a good crack might not be a bad idea,” said Robert Pippin, a custom home builder who sports a goatee and cowboy boots. His son graduated from Temple schools several years ago.

Corporal punishment remains legal in 20 states, mostly in the South, but its use is diminishing. Ohio ended it last year, and a movement for a federal ban is afoot. Most school districts across the country banned paddling of students long ago. Texas sat that trend out.

But even by Texas standards, Temple is unusual. The city, a compact railroad hub of 60,000 people, banned the practice and then revived it at the demand of parents who longed for the orderly schools of yesteryear. Since paddling was brought back to the city’s 14 schools by a unanimous board vote in May, behavior at Temple’s single high school has changed dramatically.